‘Equating Communists and Nazis is perversion of history’

Supporters of the Communist Party of Ukraine (RIA Novosti/Sergey Kozlov) / RIA Novosti

Ukraine’s new law banning the propaganda of Communism and Nazism (National Socialism) pretty much equates these two regimes which is a total perversion of history, Professor John Foster from the Communist Party of Great Britain told RT.

Ukraine's Communist
Party has suffered a fresh blow after parliament passed a law
banning communist and national socialist totalitarian regimes and
the use of any of their symbols in the country. The regime that
ruled the country until the early 90s is now declared
'illegal'.

RT:Does this legislation mean the effective
end of the Communist Party in Ukraine?

John Foster: I’m sure it won’t mean the end of
the Communist Party because it has or had a couple of years ago
100,000 members. And thousands of communists worked for the
Communist Party in the last election that was held only a few
months ago. And even in those circumstances when people were
being attacked and offices burnt, nonetheless the Communist Party
still got four percent of the vote which is hundreds of thousands
of votes. So the Communist Party won’t go away but they will be
working in very considerable difficulties.

RT:What will these difficulties be?

JF: The difficulties obviously will be
harassment. The government has attempted to ban the Communist
party all together. The legal case against them was abandoned
because the judges said they had been put under undue pressure
and they all resigned, that collapsed a few weeks ago. So
obviously the Ukrainian Parliament went down another road and
it’s now banning all the symbols of the Communist Party which
will create difficulties for the Communist Party but it will also
create great difficulties - and this is really a worrying path
for anybody in Europe - …for the peace process and for
implementing the Minsk agreement, because the Minsk agreement was
based on an understanding that Ukraine should be a plural society
recognizing different language groups and different perspectives.
And certainly the republics in the East will find it very
difficult to come to terms with the government in Kiev that is
banning the symbols of the Soviet Union, of the war against the
fascists and of the Communist Party which they see as an
intrinsic part of their own heritage and what they have defended
and which of course in a moment, in a month’s time they will be
celebrating in terms of the defeat of fascism. For a government
in Kiev to ban all that heritage, all that history, all that
struggle will make it very difficult to carry forward the
implementation of an agreement that is important for Ukraine, but
very important also for the rest of Europe if the conflict that
has currently been frozen is not to break out again.

RT:This bill pretty much equates Communism
with Nazism treating them both with the same level of disdain.
What are your thoughts on that?

JF: The reaction of a communist would be to say
that the Communist Party in the period of the last war fought
against fascism. The Soviet Union was instrumental in the defeat
of Nazi-fascism, in the liberation of Europe, in the liberation
of the extermination camps, of the Jewish people and of many
other peoples who were imprisoned within them. It was a heroic
fight in which 20 million people lost their lives from the Soviet
Russia which of course included Ukraine at that time. And to
equate that fight and those who led it and took part in it with
the people who were responsible for quite inhuman levels of
extermination that would have completely destroyed the democratic
societies of Europe, had they been victorious to do so, I think
is a total perversion of history. And of course today communists
across the world - in Latin America, Cuba, Vietnam, China - are
working for a different type of society. Not everybody would
agree with it, but they are working for a different type of
society in which it is not the monopolies and big business that
control the world but it is to some extent or rather people
democratically through public ownership who are able to develop
the economy. And that’s the basic perspectives that the
communists in Ukraine carried forward.

They were arguing prior to the coup in 2014 that what Ukraine
wanted was a plural, federal, parliamentary republic that would
not be dominated by oligarchs and corruption but would enable the
people democratically through their own parliament to be able to
determine the way forward and where the way of privatization that
had been carried out and which virtually bankrupted the Ukrainian
economy would be reversed and public ownership would be restored.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.